Saturday Husband decided he was in the mood for chili. WAY too late to get dried beans going on the stove top and no canned beans in the house.

Well, we have the Instant Pot pressure cooker for a reason, right?

With a little bit of digging we settled on THIS recipe as our cooking instructions. Downside, it does mean getting a 2nd pan dirty to brown the meat, but then so does regular chili. Upside, the meat isn’t cooked to mush by an hour in the pressure cooker. We also used a quart jar of home-made tomato sauce instead of canned tomatoes (I could have pulled fresh from the garden, but I’d JUST gone through and harvested all the ripe ones and froze most of them). Seasonings we used were chili powder, cumin, garlic, smoked paprika, salt, pepper, and home-made hot pepper powder.

Start the beans in the IP, start cutting up your pepper, and onion, and browning the meat. We timed it just about perfectly, as everything was ready to go barely a couple minutes before the IP beeped done.

Add the additional water, scoop in meat/vegi mixture, carefully pour tomato sauce on top (it needs to be on top of everything, not under everything, tomato sauce is too thick, and if it sits on the bottom of the pot it will scorch and the IP won’t come to pressure). Close the IP back up, set it for another 30 minutes, and walk away. It took a bit longer to come to pressure the 2nd time, but not horribly so.

When it was done gave it a quick stir and decided the consistency was just about right. We had to add a bit more seasoning, but that’s typical for pressure cooker cooking, and easily done.

Chili from dried beans in less than 2hrs (and no after affects from undercooked kidney beans!). Perfect!

The first Bill Bean Tomatoes. That big one weighed in at 1lb 15ounces. It had some bug damage, but most of it was good. None of the others on the vine are nearly as big though. These would make a nice slicing tomato for someone who wants sandwich or munching slices.

Green Nutmeg Melons. I was worried I started these to late, and maybe I did, but there’s a BUNCH of baby fruit forming. Cross fingers!

First cantaloupe of the season! It was very tasty too.

Yesterday’s harvest. I pulled the largest of the Snow Leopard melons. Information on how to tell when they’re ripe is distinctly lacking. Its now the right color at least. I found one page that said to pick it when the leaf at the stem died back, but that leaf wasn’t even starting to die back. Two sites said that when ripe the flower end will have a slight give, and will smell sweet. Well, it has a slight give, but it doesn’t smell sweet. Maybe I’m just too impatient. I’ll cut into it today and see what it tastes like. Worst case, there’s a BUNCH more baby melons out there, so if I needed to wait longer I should have another chance! But yah, watermelons you pick after the tendril at the stem base dies back (I usually wait a day or two beyond that for my sugar baby melons). Cantaloupe fall of the vine when they’re ripe. But apparently these do neither…..

Update: The Snow Leopard melon might not have been completely ripe, but it was still tasty! Similar to a good Honey Dew Melon, mild but sweet.

Its been an oddly busy week for me this week. I say oddly because I didn’t actually work that many hours, but what I did was frustration filled, plus some stuff here at home, and well, time…..

This past Friday was Inventory day at work. We’ve known this is coming for a several weeks of course, and as seems par for the course prepping for inventory always finds all sorts of problems. What really needed to happen was back in February, when the run-up for summer really hit, was to tell everyone that Inventory was this year and so be extra careful making sure those pallets are tagged right…..but of course no one plans that far ahead (and I’m not sure that some folks would bother even if the rest of us did). And of course there’s limits to how much work you can put into inventory prepping the sales shelves in advance, as customers alone will mess things up. Course, with our freight crew we don’t need the customers to mess things up.

Monday I worked a 4.5hr shift. Other than helping customers the only thing I did Monday was to get the first 3 bays of cleaning chemicals inventory ready. This includes a fair bit of rack diving into cruddy, nasty and dirty areas to pull out stock that’s been pushed hither and yon.

Tuesday I worked a 4hr shift. My plan was to do basic straightening on those first 3 bays, and start inventory prep on the 4th. Instead I discovered that freight had unpacked boxes of stock the night before. Why is this a bad thing? Because they find the spot where the stock goes and just shove. There were bottles EVERYWHERE. This is an ongoing problem that has been complained about all over the store, and it hasn’t changed. But that close to inventory……I went and found the manager on duty, and informed him that he should be glad my shift didn’t over lap with freight that day, because if it did he’d be writing me up before the end of the day. Maybe I got through to him just how much of an issue it was this time. I hope so. Cause I really was that pissed. I had to almost completely redo those three bays.

Thursday I worked a full day, and thankfully freight either didn’t unpack any freight, or they actually listened to management this time. Either way I’ll take it. Well, they didn’t unpack any freight in cleaning chemicals at any rate. About two hours into my day that same manager came by and asked me to do BEAR tags in outside garden (BEAR tags are basically inventory tags for pallets that are in the overheads, I have no idea what the abbreviation stands for). I asked him why, I KNOW my dept supervisory spent all day Monday tagging and verifying tags in outside garden……Wednesday night we received a Pavestone truck, and someone had put the pallets in the overheads without tags. Yup.

I did actually manage to get most of the cleaning chemicals ready for inventory by the time I left Thursday. I didn’t have to work Friday, here’s hoping things went smoothly.

Saturday I didn’t have to work at my job. But it was Open Farm Day in my county. My county is fairly agricultural, with a large number of small locally owned farms of various types. Those farms can sign up to be part of the Open Farm Day program, where they basically (for this one day) invite the public to come and visit, see the farm, and buy things right there on location. This is the 4th year that I helped man a table at the local buffalo farm. I’ve been one of their customers since they first started selling meat, and so when they needed someone who could help explain how to cook buffalo meat, and flavors, and what not they asked if I’d be willing to help. Paid for course, though the actual pay varies between cash and meat (which isn’t exactly a hardship!). Buffalo meat is extremely popular here. They can’t keep enough animals to keep up with demand. In addition for Open Farm Day they sell buffalo burgers, and pulled BBQed buffalo brisket (along with local sweet corn and salt potatoes*). Folks coming out for this event have quickly figured out that the buffalo farm is THE place to hit for lunch, and every year we sell out of food. I help with the actual selling of the raw, frozen, meat. Which means spending my day digging meat cuts out of the freezers and repeating myself over and over as to how to cook buffalo meat (its very like beef in many ways, but cooks alot like venison). Its not especially physically demanding, but I’m always completely blasted by the end of the day.

This morning (Sunday) I hurt more than I ought to. I guess digging stuff out of freezers is just enough different than my normal work to screw with me. Oh well.

Our makeshift drainpipe is working well. Though thankfully the worst of the insane monsoon season seems to have passed.

And with the passing of the crazy rains my garden is finally taking off.

Three nice big purple carrots. I forget which variety these are off the top of my head (I grow 7 or 8 varieties of carrots, of which 3 are purple). I’ve picked enough carrots at this point to clear space to plant more, so I put down seed for one of the sweet baby varieties which are quick growing. Edit: they’re either Cosmic Purple Carrots or Purple Dragon Carrots. I THINK they’re Cosmics, but it looks like I forgot to record which order I planted them in this year and Cosmics and Dragons look enough alike……

Baby Honeydew melon

Biker Billy Jalapenos

Bill Bean Tomatoes, starting to ripen!

Chocolate Habaneros

2nd planting of lettuce just starting to sprout.

Lima Beans (and weeds……)

Green Nutmeg melons. I still haven’t seen any set fruit, but the vines look awesome considering that they were a hugely late start. Cross fingers for fruit!

Sunflowers

Black Pearl Peppers. Even if you don’t care for hot peppers these would be a striking ornamental planting for an annual bed!

The insanity that is my Black Plum Tomatoes! The quick and dirty stacking of tomato cages didn’t work this year. Oh well.

This is the mixed potato and corn bed (and weeds, can’t forget the weeds!). SOMETHING, bunny sized, as apparently been nesting in it. Yay. At least they aren’t munching.

Snow Leopard melon, there’s at least a couple more good sized fruit coming along too.

Sugar Baby Watermelon

Speaking of munching…..SOMETHING (I’m thinking deer) keep trying to eat my Blazing Star flower stalks. Apparently they’re not very tasty though, as I keep finding the severed heads next to the stalks.

One day’s harvest, my first two Black Gypsy tomatoes, more carrots, a couple Hungarian Hot Wax peppers, and some Black Plum tomatoes.

The bunnies are horrid this year. I thought I had trouble keeping the new growth un-munched last year. This year though, OMG. Plus the damn things are basically LIVING in the garden, even when they aren’t munching! Thankfully the damage has been minimal, due to weekly applications of Plantskydd. But jeeeze!

My cantaloupe vines haven’t set fruit yet either, which is unusual for them, but those tires are some of the worst for weeds, and the vines aren’t as big as usual, I’m thinking the weeds are choking them out a bit. Oh well.

*Salt Potatoes are an extremely regional food. Although they’ve been featured on a couple cooking shows, 9 times out of 10 when I find someone in other parts of the country who knows what salt potatoes are it’s because they have close family from the Central-Upstate NY state area. The modern version of salt potatoes are sold prepackaged at the grocery store as 1lb of salt and 4lbs of small potatoes (about the size of baby potatoes, but not sold that way). And no, they do not taste nearly as salty as everyone expects them to. They’re extremely tasty though!

I got two zucchini, and pulled up the plants and put down black plastic to kill the weeds. Not only were the plants not happy, but then borers found them. It wasn’t worth it.

Snow Leopard Melon

My surviving sunflowers

Onions and parsnip

Baby Lima beans (I forget the variety name at the moment

Blue Berries

Berry vines. I’d actually given up on these, they’d basically not produced at all (which massively pissed me off since I’d spent a fair bit of time and money finding varieties and buying them), and I’d planned on pulling them up this spring and Roundup-ing the roots. But then I broke my arm, and now they’re producing! I’m probably still going to kill them, if I leave them they’ll take over the wildflower bed next to them, which would be fine if they were reliable producers, but they aren’t.

So, remember back when the front deck collapsed? One of the things we did afterwards was put gutters on the house. At least part of the collapse was caused by water damage, so it was worth it.

When we put the gutters on the house, everything that wasn’t tied into rain barrels was instead tied into a drainage pipe put in place by the former owners. That should have been a warning to me, you, and everyone else right there, but yah……

So half the house’s gutters drained down a pipe, that exited over a corner of the leach field.

We had the septic tank pumped late winter/early spring 2016, it needed it. We’ve always had some issues with water backing up into the tank, but nothing to serious. But then last summer was so dry that we had no issues at all.

Till fall.

By early winter not only was water backing up into the tank, but the tank was backing up into the house. Mumbling rude words about things that break we had the septic folks back out to pump the tank and do some quick trouble shooting. The general consensus was that come spring we needed to have one of their guys come out and run a scope down the leach field, since that was the most likely cause of our sudden problem.

Except come spring I couldn’t get them to talk to me. Long story I won’t bother to get into, but after 2 phone calls, an email, and a missed (by them) appointment I finally started calling around to find someone else to come out and look at the leach field.

Found someone to come out, we didn’t get things scoped, but they didn’t charge us either. The resulting conversation basically decided two things.

1: old system, likely grandfathered in, and since the former owners had only put in a new tank, not a full new leach field they’d TECHNICALLY been legal. However the whole leach was so far out of code that they weren’t going to be willing to do any repairs, it was going to need to be replaced completely, and due to the high water table, and low soil permeability it was likely going to need a raised bed system, which means an engineer…..

2: the likely cause of our current sudden problems was likely the extra water from the gutters. Had a massive duh moment over that one. Thankfully despite the monsoons we’ve been getting we’ve not had anything backing up into the house this spring/summer. So far anyway. But that water from the gutters needed to be diverted.

Our original plan had been to rent a trencher, and put in additional drainage pipe. But with everything thats been going on that wasn’t going to happen. So yesterday I spent a couple hours digging out the end of the drainage pipe, digging a level trench from it out to where it exited the little hill the house is on, and fitting on 30feet of additional drainage pipe.

Its makeshift as heck, it’ll have to be moved every time we mow, but maybe just maybe it’ll divert enough water to keep things from getting worse!

Speaking of which, this is a photo of the end of the buried pipe:

I didn’t dig up enough to read any markings on it, but it looks like a thin walled PVC. But its also not any (current) standard size. This is a closeup of the measurement of the diameter with the tape on the outside of the pipe:

Just a hair under 3 1/4 inches for the inside diameter. I have no idea where they got the pipe. I can’t find it anywhere. 3 inch fittings are too small. 4 inch are of course to big. I finally jut bought the standard 4 inch flexible drainage pipe and dug up enough of the pipe in the ground to slide the 4 inch pipe over it enough to stay.

I’ve now picked 4 ripe Black Plum tomatoes. While this isn’t tons, it is several weeks early. And there are more turning colors. So far though neither of the other varieties I planted this year are ripening yet.

The garden isn’t as well grown as last year, BUT, we may have finally passed the worst of the monsoons this year (crossing fingers!) so hopefully we’ll see some more regular growth now.

Snow Leopard Melons, although you can’t see it in the photo this is the only melon so far to have an actual baby melon growing. Though the others are all blooming away, so it shouldn’t be long.

Potatoes and corn. Despite the fact that the tallest corn stalk is barely a foot tall several of them are trying to produce ears! I guess we’ll see what I get……

One weird thing though…..the lettuce had bolted, and one day this past week, I noticed that the tops of several of the tallest lettuce plants had been clearly munched. I figured a deer, but nothing else had been chewed on….then I looked closer, and realized the middle of the lettuce was flattened, as if something had plopped down into the middle of it.

So then I thought that maybe a bunny had finally noticed the tasty stuff over his head (these stock tanks are 2ft tall) and hopped into the bed to munch…..but there was no bunny poop!

I decided that since it had all bolted anyways it was time to pull it all up and reseed. In the process of pulling it all up, I found an empty, but fairly new, mouse nest! The grass used to make it was still pretty green. Looking at the top picture, at the top of the bed, right to the right of the tall green spike, it was under there! So now I’m wondering if the flattening was the result of someone making a meal out of a mouse…..but that doesn’t explain the munched tops either. So a mystery it remains!